Creating a synthetic database for research in migration and subjective well-being

While recent advances in migration studies call for targeted research on migration aspirations and the cognitive mechanisms of voluntariness when making choices among alternatives of behaviour, detailed information on (potential) migrants' subjective characteristics, including cognitive evaluations of life and life conditions is still scarce in official statistics. With the aim of establishing good practices for statistical matching estimation methods for official migration statistics in Hungary on the one hand, and encouraging migration researchers to create and use synthetic data to get insights into the subjective characteristics of potential migrants on the other, this paper reports on the methodological details of a statistical matching experiment that combines the International Migration and the Subjective Well-being complementary questionnaires of Hungarian Microcensus 2016. In the experiment, eight variants of non-parametric hot deck methods were performed to create synthetic data sets and evaluated both from a methodological and an analytical point of view.